BRANDO, MARLON (b. 1924)

A 24-year-old Brando as Stanley Kowalski on the set of the stage version of "A Streetcar Named Desire, photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1948"

Marlon Brando was born on April 3, 1924, in
Omaha, Nebraska, to Dorothy Pennebaker
Brando and Marlon Brando Sr. The Brandos
had two other children, Jocelyn and Frances.
Marlon's bully of a father was a salesman; his
eccentric mother was an actress with the local
community theater. Both had drinking problems.
Descended from Irish immigrants, the
family had been living in Nebraska for generations.
Brando spent the first six years of his life
in Omaha in a large wood-shingled house on
a quiet street lined with elm trees. His earliest
memories recall the sweet fragrance of freshcut
hay and lilies of the valley and the grating
sound of boots on frozen snow on a frigid
Plains winter day. In 1930 his father took a job
in Evanston, Illinois, and the family left Nebraska
behind.

In 1943, when he was nineteen years old,
Brando moved to New York City and began
studying acting at the Dramatic Workshop
of the New School for Social Research. His
teacher, Stella Adler, had studied with Konstantin
Stanislavsky, the director, acting theorist,
and founder of the Moscow Art Theatre.
In 1944, when he was twenty years old, Brando
had his Broadway debut as Nels in the Richard
Rodgers production of I Remember Mama.
The play ran for two years. This was followed
by performances in 1946 in Maxwell Anderson's
Truckline Cafe, George Bernard Shaw's
Candida, and Ben Hecht's A Flag Is Born. In
1947 Brando was chosen for the role of Stanley
Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan. The
Broadway premiere was a tremendous success.
Marlon Brando became a star celebrated by
audiences and critics alike.

In 1950 Marlon Brando began his career as a
film actor. He brought his acting style and his
training from Elia Kazan and the Actors Studio
to the screen. In his film debut in Stanley
Kramer's The Men, he played an embittered
paraplegic. He prepared for the role by spending
a month in a hospital ward for the rehabilitation
of paraplegics. Brando was subsequently
nominated for a best actor Academy
Award for four successive years: for his performances
as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata! (1952), and Marc Anthony in Julius Caesar (1953). He won the award for his portrayal
of Terry Malloy, under the direction of
Elia Kazan, in On the Waterfront (1954).

In 1971 Brando won his second Oscar for his
powerful performance as Don Corleone, the
patriarch of the Corleone crime family in The Godfather. In 1972 he was nominated for another
best actor Oscar for his role in Bernardo
Bertolucci's controversial Last Tango in Paris.
In 1989 Brando gained another Oscar nomination
for best supporting actor in A Dry White Season. He has continued to make
films.

Through all of life's vicissitudes Marlon
Brando has remained the quintessential film
actor. He revolutionized the concepts of film
acting yet repeatedly dismissed acting as a
waste of precious time and life. Deeply and
actively committed to humanitarian causes,
he has vigorously used his heroic status to
publicly advance civil rights, from joining Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington
to his refusal to accept his Oscar for The
Godfather as a way of protesting the treatment
of Native Americans.